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nVidia Shadowplay is available - anyone tried it?

Latest driver update on my desktop (R331) says that Shadowplay is now available for GTX650 cards upwards...

That's GPU hardware-based video capture - I'm curious because with my relatively meagre system I can never really do capture without quite a bit of penalty in FPS/smoothness terms (and making MAHOOSIVE FILES)

Geez. You are in dire need of an upgrade, there. I can't try Shadowplay as I have an AMD card, but I HAVE started using Dxtory lately. It's great for recording and gives almost no hit to your FPS.

I'm pretty happy tbh, in fact I'd probably see the need for an upgrade for work over gaming right now (it can chug with 2 IDEs running at the same time!)

I'm smelling a bit of childishness from nVidia here, demanding a much higher-spec AMD CPU than Intel - where I'm at now, if I had a quad-core I could encode happily with MSI Afterburner anyway, so I'm not sure why I'd want their relatively limited solution (10 min cap atm)

The idea is that this removes the load on the CPU - setting a relatively high benchmark for the CPU is giving the wrong message surely?

I tried DXTory and it was just overkill for my needs - MSI Afterburner does a decent job and it's free which is a good price - it's not like I'm planning to stream my life :)

HoHo - they're deleting any comment which talk about the CPU requirement on their post, I actually replied to someone who asked what the reqs were (no mention on the page but the driver has them) and even that was removed!!

I captured roughly 8 minutes worth of BC2 gameplay (1080p, max settings) and got a 2,13 GB file. I didn't notice it running and experienced no slow downs (although I didn't meassure the FPS) - pretty sure it's the first tool I've tried, that I can say that about.

After a bit of playing about with shadow play I finally got it to work. Its actually pretty sweet. There is probably a 1% performance hit where cpu ram and gpu jump but it is literally next to nothing. And the fact its spurting out 1080P at 60fps im happy as a clam with that. Fraps was giving me about a 3-4% performance hit. So it defiantly would be worth it just for them few frames.

Also a handy feature is that it captures the last 10 minutes of game play if i hit a combination of buttons. So no more need for the OOOOHHHH crap i forgot to record that when going on a crazy killing spree xD

I tried it last night and it worked flawlessly. I didn't notice any performance hit when playing BioShock: Infinite at 1920 x 1200 with everything turned up to eleven. Here is a video I uploaded to YouTube (minor spoilers):

Can someone explain to me in small words what this all actually means? As someone who doesn't make videos, and doesn't really understand the technical aspects of doing so, what is different or significant about this?

Can someone explain to me in small words what this all actually means? As someone who doesn't make videos, and doesn't really understand the technical aspects of doing so, what is different or significant about this?

In a nutshell: Making videos takes lots of CPU power. This lets the GPU do it with almost no drop in performance. More importantly: It is a very user-friendly and simple interface that can "run all the time", so now anyone can make videos. Not just the people who bothered to read up and set up their system for it.

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

I'm disappointed, it doesn't seem to work with resolutions less (and probably more) than 1080p; I tried to record some Borderlands 2 at 1680x1050 and the little Shadowplay indicator just sits there with a red line through it. If I press alt-F9 to record, the icon turns into a green dot, but still with the red line through it. I assume this is because of the resolution, anyway, since I have an i5 2500K, plenty of hard drive space and a GTX 680. It could be the fact that I was running 1680x1050 but had two other monitors connected in Surround, but Afterburner deals with that just fine so I don't know why it would care.

In a nutshell: Making videos takes lots of CPU power. This lets the GPU do it with almost no drop in performance. More importantly: It is a very user-friendly and simple interface that can "run all the time", so now anyone can make videos. Not just the people who bothered to read up and set up their system for it.

Thanks, gundato. To my uneducated brain the GPU seems like the perfect place to record video from, right? Something like taking the output data stream that ordinarily just goes to the monitor and encoding it into a video file.

Thanks, gundato. To my uneducated brain the GPU seems like the perfect place to record video from, right? Something like taking the output data stream that ordinarily just goes to the monitor and encoding it into a video file.

It only works on the newest cards because they have specialized hardware, a H.265 encoder if I'm correct. So it's like a co-processor dedicated to video encoding.
Yo dawg I heard you like graphics cards, etc.

It only works on the newest cards because they have specialized hardware, a H.265 encoder if I'm correct. So it's like a co-processor dedicated to video encoding.
Yo dawg I heard you like graphics cards, etc.

Pretty much. It is basically the same principle behind the PS4's dedicated video processing/encoding unit, just in GPU form because "why not?"

Of course, that unit ALSO seems like it is going to be used for streaming to other devices (nvidia shield) and to encourage "second screen" like behavior.

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

Yeah, dedicated encoding chips are nothing new. MP3 did it for a while up until it became child's play to do it in software (mist small devices would still do it on chip, but only probably a DAB radio level these days at a guess, I'm no expert).

So, as your playing a game, and not watching youtube/bluray etc, it's just sitting there. Brilliant idea to put it to use!